13th April, 2012, Mohali: Pune Warriors suffered their first defeat, in the fifth season of Indian Premier League, in the hands of Kings XI Punjab, last night, in Mohali. Batting first, Pune set the target of just 166 for the home team. In the second half of the match, Punjab reached the score in 17.4 overs with the loss of 4 wickets.
With 31 runs, Manhas was the highest scorer for the visitors, whereas S. Marsh made 64 for the home team to seal a victory. Both A Gilchrist and P Chawla made 21 runs for Kings XI.
After the match, Ganguly, the skipper of Pune Warriors, blamed their batting performance for this dismal show. He also added that “It was an important toss to win, we would have also wanted to bowl first but this was a good performance from the Punjab bowlers and you cannot take the credit out of the Kings XI,”
“We should have shown a bit more commonsense and get to 140; it should have been a good total. We had 115 runs on board and we needed to be a lot more smarter,”
“We need to be more sensible with our batting and hopefully we will learn from this loss.” he Ganguly.
Kings XI skipper Adam Gilchrist was reasonably happy with this win. “Good to get things started, early days in the tournaments. Bowlers did a good job in getting the movement off the air. We managed a good couple of days of work out after the lose in Pune and it helped,” he told after the match.
